Promotion of Open Access Publications and Visibility by Institutions in South Africa

Information Technology infrastructure, internet connectivity, platform agility and institutional governance remain significant challenges to Open Access (OA) publishing on the African continent. This study examined South African libraries and institutions' efforts to promote open-access publications. Bibliometric tools were used to analyse research outputs, trends, and citations. An informetric analysis of abstracts and titles of (n =4,808) samples from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) outputs in Scopus Databases was conducted. The top 1,999 of these outputs accounted for a total citation count of (n =18, 913), representing 1,686 of the total link strengths of the outputs. This finding suggests that OA may promote the visibility and prominence of African scholarship and knowledge dissemination in the Social Sciences. Our findings present the extent of SSH contributions to Open Access Publishing (OAP) and the most prolific contributors and institutional ranking of OAP in South Africa. The descriptive statistics of the publications metric summary were max = 4,808, mu= 57.742, sigma(2) = 186857.721, and sigma = 432.270. The implications of these findings suggest that low OAP will significantly hinder African scholarship, knowledge dissemination and scholar's visibility. It is recommended that institutions promote more OAP to increase the visibility and prominence of South African scholars' academic output.